An example of a vehicle control system is disclosed in Patent Document 1 (JP Publication of Application No. 2005-067870). In the vehicle control system of Patent Document 1, the position of the vehicle which can travel within a measurement target area and the position of an interfering object which can move within the measurement target area are detected by a position measurement portion. And travel of the vehicle is controlled based on the detected information from the position measurement portion to avoid interference with the interfering object.
More specifically, the vehicle control system of Patent Document 1 includes, as the position measurement portion, a laser range finder provided to the vehicle, and a plurality of reflecting plates provided at designated positions in the measurement target area, and calculates the position of the vehicle in the measurement target area based on the distance from each of the plurality of reflecting plates measured with the laser range finder. The vehicle control system of Patent Document 1 also includes, as the position measurement portion, an interfering object sensor provided to the front face of the vehicle to detect any interfering object that is approaching the vehicle, and performs a control in which, for example, the travel upper limit speed of the vehicle is set to a lower speed if and when the distance between the vehicle and the interfering object becomes less than or equal to a predetermined distance.
Another example of the position measurement portion is a system which includes a camera for capturing an image of the measurement target area, and which measures the position of each of the vehicle and a plurality of interfering objects from the captured image from the camera, as well as a system in which a wireless tag is provided to each of the vehicle and a plurality of interfering objects in the measurement target area, and in which the positions of the wireless tags are measured with a wireless position measurement portion.